For many of us, chasing down the total eclipse of the sun on Monday was a bucket-list thing, and, like all such now-or-never matters, it exacted a cost.
Coming back to Memphis from Hardy, Arkansas, where my son Marcus and I went early on Monday to rendezvous with daughter Julia and friends to see the natural much-ballyhooed natural spectacle firsthand, turned into an eight-hour drive, beginning at 3 p.m. after a delightful Thai lunch at Hardy and ending at close to 11 p.m. at home.
I bring this up because it occurs to me that this is how it always goes with bucket-list things. Putting it simply, you pay a price for them.
For those in government, public progress is a bucket-list matter, it dawned on me, and I suddenly saw a speech I’d heard the previous week in exactly that light.
This was Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris addressing a group of Germantown Democrats about the things he is determined to accomplish in this, his second and final term in office. He was first elected in 2018, and the first term was something of a wrangle. As is so often the case, it takes a while to get the hang of the people and the problems.
Harris told the Democrats: “I’m going to show [that the] county mayor’s office and Shelby County government is a huge organization. And it does a variety of things. You know, it’s a $1.6 billion budget, thousands of employees, so many, many, many programs.”
Announcing he would focus on three areas — public safety, healthcare, and education — the mayor did a little recapping and quickly swung to his main point of the evening.
“One of the things that is important that I’m working on right now is a residential mental health facility. And so it’s the idea that we have a problem in Memphis and Shelby County. And the problem is, there’s not enough access to mental health care.
“One of the key problems right now is [that there are] about 2,000 people in detention right now. And more than half of them have a mental health care need. The DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] might want to move those cases; the judges might want to move those cases forward. But a lot of those cases can’t be moved forward until the individuals have 14 days of stabilization. So they’ve got to get access to healthcare; they’ve got to get their prescriptions. They’ve got to see a healthcare provider. … And so we’re a little bit behind in some ways, right?”
Harris went on to propose a new 60-bed facility for Shelby County. “And we will be able, upon arrest, to move individuals that need those services immediately to the mental health facility, and away from the traditional jail detention facility. One of the benefits of that is that it creates a lot of opportunities for collaboration among our criminal justice stakeholders.
“So the cost of doing all this is probably about $400 a day, right? Right now as a person in our jail or detention facilities it’s about $100 a day. By contrast, the cost for this kind of specialized care is dramatically more. But a portion of those individuals would be better served by getting treatment, and having their cases in advance, you move a few of those 508 cases. Our expectation is that over time, the county will save money.”
The bottom line: “So it costs us at least $20 million. But people have been talking about this for a very long time.“
So far, Mayor Harris has enjoyed a resourceful second term, working for the most part with a same-minded county commission. He has arranged for a long-needed expansion of the Regional One Health facility and the equally overdue creation of two new public schools.
The proposed new mental health facility, which he has since asked the commission to engage with, would raise things to the level of a perfecta.
Just to let you know he’s got that and more on his political bucket list, and he’s working on them.